People can have an advantage when applying for a job for various reasons but don't have any privilege that gives things to them. It does exist - rich kids get jobs for no other reason than who their family is. I don't buy that white people get given jobs for being white.
I'll type this out as quickly as possible, and probably won't cover every base, but perhaps this gives you a better idea of the issue with "happerdasch." At this point in time, the "because they were a race" exists, but it's rare. Lots of the issues have to do with long term conditioning on BOTH sides, etc. here's a very quick case study about a guy named John Doe. Please accept the case study as-is without trying to change every aspect of the story, as it's just showing a perspective that many people don't imagine.
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- John is born black to black parents in the inner city. His grandfather was the child of sharecroppers (who were children of slaves), with no education, who had multiple kids, and died early (this happened a LOT ~3 generations ago).
- John's father got a second rate education in a "black" school. Because segregation was in play, his father's hopes throughout school, pretty much bottomed out at "factory worker," since that's the best that anyone around him achieved. Even when he looked at films and television, he only saw people of his race represented in menial labor, which curbed the expectations he had for himself and his children.
- He managed to eke out a lower class life and had kids of his own.
- John is born, and segregation is over now, but black people still aren't represented widely in media as successful (this basically started in wide range in the mid-80s), and due to so many other people coming from similar circumstances, people don't acheieve much.
- He sees himself as a person, and sees white people as people too at a very young age because they're represented more than anyone in all media (television, etc.). However, when he branches out to other people of different races on rare occeasions, perhaps he's fortunate enough to go to a charter school or something, many acknowledge his race in itself, giving him a default relation with his race.
- Because most people around him have similar experiences, they equate themselves with their race as well. When that's the first thing about you that everyone else recognizes, at a young age, especially, it's REALLY hard to remove it from your self "identity."
- He sees some people that share the color of the people he's seen in positions of power - CEOs, Presidents, Senators, etc. also deginerate his race from time to time through life, sometimes on a personal level. In the future, that raises a question of possibility or fear in his mind, when those people have power over him (a boss, teacher, etc.), whether they share similar views and just aren't vocalizing them.
- He sees in media that only his own race is attracted to his color (not many interracial relationships shown in media until the 2000s) except in the most rare occasions, which is also backed up by what he sees and hears in reality. Unless he lives in a black majority area, he always worries whether people aren't attracted to him because of his race or other reasons, as there's no real way to know the difference.
- In the inner city, due to varying starting conditions and the relation with income/education/family conditions, many peers and people around him turn to crime out of desperation. He sees that those people are able to obtain the luxuries that his parents can never acheieve or give them with their jobs. Media rarely shows successful people of his own race that aren't sports players or stars.
- Etc. etc. etc. I don't have time to write any more at the moment.
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That's a basic midpoint of the experience of a high, perhaps the highest percentage of 35-45 year old black people right now. "Race" comes into play in ridiculous amounts of aspects of their lives, and their self identity is framed through their race, because that was hoisted onto them by outside circumstances.
People often don't consider things like how media influence affects self-representation, etc. (if everything around you is not showing you that you can succeed, it's harder to find a drive to succeed), and you minimized the effect of outward racism on current condition (look in that case study, how closely removed adults are now, from parents who weren't allowed to be anything more than lower middle class, just by the law.
So, when John grows up to be an adult, maybe he got lucky and happened to a) find good influences, and b) found them at the right time and place to take advantage of them enough to get a "normal" level education in the end. He still has a bunch of baggage from his history and things going against him in his past that may put him behind his peers, and doubts and things that come from his racial self identity which are not his fault at all, but were bred into him at a suceptible age, etc. And he doesn't have a familial or community network that he can fall back on to give him the contacts to give him a job, nor does he have family/community peers that can really teach/tell him the tricks of the trade to maintain and excel at many jobs, because they did not experience that themselves.
As stated above, it's not about a 100% success/fail ratio; it's about a) recognizing that due to different starting conditions, different people deal with many things that work against them, that the average person does not even consider, and b) trying to make it so that as many people as possible have better starting positions, to minimize the failure rate of those in demographic groups in the end.
When people say things like "it's the 2000s, black president!" they're ignoring that children of the 70s and 80s didn't have the hopes to become president, or even professionals, and were just trying to survive, and those are the adults now. People act like just because those hopes exist to black kids now, it should retroactively affect people that have already lived most of their lives by default, and ignore what a lack of hope can do to people as a whole. Poor white people in bad areas still had images being fed to them of successful white people constantly, and had an identity that was not centered around race, unless they happened to be in areas where THEY were the minorities.
